Henry Stewart’s LA leg of their DAM conference schedule is on this year (2013) between November 14th-15th at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza, Beverly Hills. The conference will cover a wide range of topics, including:

Building DAM capabilities

Overcoming Change Management challenges

Successfully integrating and sustaining DAM

Rights Management and Digital Content

Integrating DAM and and Content Management Systems (CMS)

Selecting a DAM or MAM system

Getting started with video

Metadata

Getting your programme funded and implemented

Some of the speakers include: David Lipsey (Optimity), Jason Bright (MediaBeacon), Richard Buchanan (Comcast), Rich Carroll (IO Integration), Eric Courville (North Plains), Julie Dutrisac (National Film Board of Canada), Jeff Kazanow (Intuit), Dan McGraw (Seven Dials Media) and Matt Turner (Mark Logic). There are quite a few others – both well known and others who I was less familiar with. A full speaker list is available on the Henry Stewart website.

There isn’t much of note in the promotional blurb, but this line is a good one:

“DAM is now an essential Enterprise Application and must be recognized as such. We’ll explore why this is so and what are the implications of it being so. We’ll hear the experiences of the leaders in thought and action reviewing the problems and solutions, as always, from the user’s perspective.” [Read More]

Given that over half the speakers appear to be from the supply-side of the DAM industry, I am a bit dubious over whether these events really are ‘from the user perspective’ as much as the organisers would like them to be, however, I will acknowledge that persuading existing DAM users to turn up at an event where they can learn about all the mistakes they made with their own DAM initiative (after they have already spent their budget) possibly isn’t the easiest sales proposition.

I have mentioned giving presentations at these type of events to a few of my employer’s DAM consulting clients (including some invite-only seminars we put on ourselves) and one of the other problems is that most DAM users are massively overworked and busy with various other projects. Although DAM is an on-going process, the reality for most users is that it has peaks and troughs across the year in terms of their interest levels – which usually coincide with some major changes or key events. Apart from those times, the only other occasion they might think about what’s going on with their DAM programmes is when there is some problem like major system outages, budget overruns or lots of complaints from colleagues. The first line from the quote about DAM now being ‘an essential enterprise application’ I would agree with and this might result in end users taking an increased interest in exactly what is going on with their DAM strategy on a more frequent and regular basis than they do now.

As a good way to assemble a lot of expertise in one location, these events probably do offer some benefits, especially if you are pre-implementation and expect to be spending is in the high five or six figure range. The potential expertise on-hand is a fractional proportion of what you will be spending anyway and as I have discussed before, if you are well organised and have clear objectives in mind, they can represent good value and provide a way to trim down your consulting and/or professional services costs.